[NEWS ROUND UP] December 2017

We’ve nearly at the end of the year, but what a year it’s been. It’s been 12 months that’s been chock-a-block with concerts in Europe, numerous entries in the UK iTunes chart and overall, it’s been K-Pop’s best year in Europe. Without further ado, we’ll look into some of the biggest news for December!

Upcoming Concerts in Europe 2018

2016 had offered up a fantastic selection of K-Pop artists coming over to perform in Europe, to quickly summarise 24K had their European tour in January and also swiftly made a quick return in August, Elo and DJ Pumpkin worked alongside with BeatCraze Events for an event in April, Dean proved to be popular as an extra date was later added after the initial date got sold out in June. And not to forget, we had special performances from Highlight, EXID, KNK and SNUPER during the summer Feel Korea concert in July, which started after the successful London Korean Festival!

After much waiting from their European fans, MONSTA X came to perform in Paris, Berlin and Moscow during August and hopefully, they’ll return soon with UK dates! Rookie group KARD extended their World Tour to include Europe with September dates, Drug Restaurant was brought over by Young Bros in September, hundreds were excited that G-Dragon had finally announced European fans for September. For the latter part of 2017 in October, we had DPR Live perform in London which also sold out, F.T. Island had 6 tour stops in Moscow, Budapest, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Paris and Istanbul and finally to finish off with the HIGHGRND band Hyukoh, who performed in Europe from October to early November!

The month of February looks already jam packed with concert dates! Now, if you wanted a refresher on who’s been confirmed for European tours or those coming to the UK, the first European Tour on our list is AlphaBAT‘s, they have dates for late January to early February in London, Paris, Warsaw and Cologne! Tickets are now available here, so make sure to purchase them to see a great show with reasonable prices for all tickets! Next up to follow is the sold-out show with Jay Park, Sik-k, Hoody and DJ Wegun, they will coming over to London to perform on February 4 and this concert’s tickets had sold out within minutes and evidently shows the demand from fans here in the UK! Rock Bottom will be coming in February and Dreamcatcher is the first group to venture out for a European Tour from February 14 – 23 which is pretty exciting!

There’s also discussions being made about the crowned winning group from the competition show MIXNINE coming to perform in Europe too! While they are still in the early stages of preparing and finalising details, we’ll make sure to add the updates once they have been released! Also in March, HALO was one of the first groups to confirm that they would be coming to Europe next year! And lastly, while there are no official announcements yet, BTS have talked on several occasions about wanting to come to Europe for their next World Tour, but with how much support they get over here, we’re sure the boys will want to show their appreciation for UK ARMY’s soon!

RMXFallOutBoy Collaboration

Following the immense success from BTS’ most recent release, which was Steve Aoki’s remix of ‘Mic Drop’ with an additional featuring artist with Desiinger, it shot up to #1 on the US and #5 the UK iTunes charts, which sparked off the first of many collaborations that intertwines and brings together Western and Eastern artists. BTS spoke out how many Western artists have approached them in regards to future collaborations, a few names include Shawn Mendes, Khalid and Zedd! Yesterday, Fall Out Boy’s remix song for ‘Champion‘ featured RM (Kim Namjoon), the leader of the global phenomenon group. The former is on one of the most well-known bands from the US and while this track was dropped last minute, it certainly teases the beginning of many more exciting projects in the future. You can purchase it on iTunes here for £0.99 (also, it peaked at #39 here in the UK) and you can also stream it on Spotify too!

Eric Nam’s #HoldMeChallenge

It doesn’t hurt to add a touch more positivity in this world whenever you can. The soloist had put forward an idea that encourages people to give a hug to somebody and/or something that they care most about. Whether this may be a person or an item that got them through challenging times, it takes a moment to show your appreciation. A Hug is often the type of greeting to express that we’ve missed someone, it could be the first thing you do when you see a friend for an overdue catch up or it could also be used to say farewell. We really like this project from Eric Nam, it provokes the thought that in a life that has no guarantees if you have a moment to cherish your nearest and dearest, then don’t hesitate to do so, even if you’re not someone who feels comfortable verbalising how you feel, the meaning of a hug is universal and speak more comfort than words could ever do.

YouTube Most Viewed K-Pop Video in the World

While BTS has had an explosively successful year, both domestically and on a global scale, it was revealed that BLACKPINK despite only having released one M/V this year with ‘As If It’s Your Last‘, they ranked #1. BTS followed on with the most entries including #2, #3 and #5 with ‘DNA‘, ‘Not Today‘ and ‘Spring Day‘ respectively. The only other girl group to climb high in the list is none other than TWICE with a double entry with ‘Knock Knock‘ at #4 and ‘Signal‘ at #6! BIGBANG remains to be a popular choice with ‘Fxxx It‘ at #7, Chanyeol’s collaborative track with Punch’s ‘Stay with Me‘ came in at #8 and he’s followed alongside his EXO members at #9 with ‘Ko Ko Bop‘ and finally PSY completing the list with ‘New Face’ at #10! Metro also featured this list, which you can check out here.

A post shared by BLΛƆKPIИK (@blackpinkofficial) on Dec 15, 2017 at 12:24am PST

#UKPAwards

As revealed last month, we will be reviving UKP Awards to finish off this year and we’re currently in the final stages of preparing our Winter E-Mag and the candidates for all 19 categories will be announced, so make sure you stay tuned for that! Just a few categories we have this year include ‘Best Song’, ‘Best Album’, ‘Best Music Video’, ‘Best Male Group’, ‘Best Female Group’ and many more! We’ll be writing up how you can vote for all your favourites very shortly by using #UKPAwards to make your votes count and we’ll count them all up to confirm the crowned winners around the end of the year!